Baby Crochet Hats and Coordinating Gift Box

A friend of ours is having a little girl soon and I've been stumped over what to do for them. This is their 2nd baby, so I knew they'd have the essentials, so it took me a while to decide on what I wanted to do for them. I finally decided to crochet some cute little hats, and since their first baby was a boy I figured I'd make them girly girly. I found some really cute pink yarn at WalMart. I used Peaches and Creme #02416 (Rose is a Rose).  

Hat # 1:

I based this hat off of a picture I saw. It took me a few tries to get it right, but it finally came together. 

The flower tutorial is found at Bonita Patterns. 

Hat #2

I found the tutorial for this hat on Vallieskids. I bought wooden buttons to put on this, but when I got them home they just didn't look right. I dug through my stash of buttons and found these that fit much better. 

Hat #3

This hat was made from a tutorial off of The Dainty Daisy.

I didn't attach the flower to this hat since the other hat has a flower. I didn't know if she'd want just a plain beanie without a flower. So she can attach the flower if she wants or it can be used on a headband or tossed out or whatever. But I figured I'd let her decide. The flower tutorial can be found at Action Hero :: Knitting Weblog.  

I sat and stewed over how I was going to wrap these all up. I've made the goal to not use gift bags at all during 2012 and to put thought into how I wrap gifts. It forces me to be creative and the gifts end up looking a little nicer that way too. 

I rummaged through my craft room until I found this plain white box I'd stashed away (one of my "I can use this someday" moments that finally paid off). Instead of using tissue paper I filled the box with 2 fat quarters of pink fabric from my stash. Then I took a 3rd fat quarter and wrapped it around the box, taping the edges down on the underside of the box. I then wrapped white yarn around the box/fabric, taping the ends securely on the bottom of the box. Using a small piece of yarn I gathered the yarn stripes together and then tied the paper flower to them. Voila! A cute gift box. A bonus to wrapping this way...she can use the fat quarter pieces however she likes!